Craig Mayhew’s Blog

Thunderbird 3 is awesome, I’ve only had one issue with it and that’s when it used up all the space on my primary drive. I thought it was odd but moved my thunderbird profile to it’s own drive. I realised the sent items just kept getting bigger literally as the minutes past. I opened my sent items to find it had duplicated every email about 25 times (and was still duplicating them) this gave me a sent items box that was fast approachiung 30GBs! I downloaded the thunderbird deduplication addon which is available here https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/956. It removed the duplicate emails but even after running a compact my sent items didn’t change size on disk. In the end I renamed the sent item files “Sent” and “Sent.msf” to “sent.damaged” and “Sent.msf.damaged” and Thunderbird downloaded a fresh copy. Then once I was sure the emails hadn’t been wiped out, I deleted the broken files completely.

So far, I haven’t had a repeat of this issue and I do not know what caused it. At a guess my Sent Items were corrupted somehow.

The usual reason for not being able to update the scripts is that your permissions are wrong in your Firefox folder. Your Grease Monkey scripts will be in your firefox folder. The default place for this is (please substitute {username} for your actual Ubuntu user name):

cd /home/{username}/.mozilla/firefox/gm_scripts/

You need to make sure you are the owner of this folder. This command will make sure you are. Again please substitute whats inside the {} brackets.

chown -R {username}:{usergroup} /home/{username}/.mozilla/firefox/gm_scripts

If that still fails to fix the problem, then you also need to make sure you have write permissions on your firefox settings folder.

chmod -R 755 /home/{username}/.mozilla/firefox/gm_scripts

The seond life viewer has “File, Edit, View, World, Tools and Help.” along the top.

If you can’t see Advanced, press Ctrl, Alt and D together – that will bring up the Advanced option.

Click on Advanced. Click ‘Character’. From the next sub-menu, click on ‘Character Tests’. Finally, click on ‘Go Away/AFK When Idle’. Make sure this doesn;t have an X next to it.

After upgrading to Google Earth 5.1 I now get the following error when starting from command line. Error: ./libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.9′ not found (required by ./libgoogleearth_lib.so).

It’s also worth noting that if I click the Google Earth icon it just sits there with no errors.

To fix this simply remove or rename libstdc++.so.6 and libgcc_s.so.1 in the installation directory.

For some people this will be:

cd /opt/google-earth/

For others (me included) this will be:

cd ~/google-earth/

To rename the files:

sudo mv libstdc++.so.6 libstdc++.so.6.orig
sudo mv libgcc_s.so.1 libgcc_s.so.1.orig

Now Google Earth should start without the error!

This article details how to download and compile the latest bleeding edge build of Firefox on Microsoft Windows 7. The firefox build will be full of bugs because it is bleeding edge, so don’t use this for anything important :) On the upside you will get to play with new features long before anyone that waits for “stable” versions to be released. Here we go:

Install MozillaBuild, a package of additional build tools. Make sure you install this with a directory path that does not contain any spaces (e.g. c:\mozilla-build\). If you get a message saying this application did not install properly then you should see a windows dialog giving you the option to re-install with the ‘correct settings’. After that all should be well.

If you don’t already have Visual C++ 2008 then download and install the express edition from http://www.microsoft.com/Express/vc/

Download the windows SDK if you don’t already have it installed (If unsure install it anyway) from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/thankyou.aspx?familyId=c17ba869-9671-4330-a63e-1fd44e0e2505&displayLang=en

We need to make sure that windows is using the SDK that we have just installed. Find “Windows SDK Configuration Tool” on your start menu, run it. Select “v7.0″ (or higher) in the drop down box and click “make current”.

Now we need to create your mozconfig file. This will contain various compile options for your custom build of firefox. Substituting {username} for your real username, you should find your mozconfig file here: C:\Users\{username}\mozilla-central\mozconfig

I recommend that unless you know what your doing or run into compile issues that are specific to your system then edit your mozconfig file to look like this:

. $topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfig
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/objdir-ff-release
mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS="-j4"

#adding this to prevent it erroring about not being able to build for version 601000
mk_add_options MOZ_WINSDK_TARGETVER=600

#stop the atl errors
ac_add_options --disable-xpconnect-idispatch
ac_add_options --disable-activex
ac_add_options --disable-activex-scripting
ac_add_options --disable-accessibility

Hurrah, that’s all of the setup out of the way. Now we can try and compile firefox! Open a shell window by running: c:\mozilla-build\start-msvc9.bat. Even if you’re on 64-bit Windows, do not use the files ending in -x64.bat.

In the newly opened shell window type the following:
To get the latest source:

hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/

To navigate to the mozilla-central directory:

cd mozilla-central

To start the build process:

make -f client.mk

Once compiled (It may take hours depending on your system) the firefox executable can be found in C:\Users\{username}\mozilla-central\objdir-ff-release\dist\bin

I recommend you create a shortcut to the executable and don’t open it directly. This way you can have it run from a different firefox profile and have it running at the same time as your standard firefox build while keeping the two completely seperate. This will prevent the addons etc from erroring about the unsupported firefox version. The short cut should be formatted as such: “Firefox.exe” -p “{PROFILE}” -no-remote (note: substitute the name of your profile for {PROFILE} or omit to launch the profile manger instead). I’ve set mine to “Firefox.exe” -p “nightly” -no-remote

If your still unable to compile firefox then please leave a comment, then try other resources such as https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Simple_Firefox_build.

Unfortunately the IPv6 issue is still at large in Karmic Koala and will effect just about every internet application.

The problem is caused by Ubuntu requesting everything by IPv6 first even if there are no IPv6 Interfaces configured and timing out each time when it doesn’t get a response.

The workaround in firefox is to go to “about:config”, just type it into the address bar and hit enter. Then change the value network.dns.disableIPv6 to TRUE.

The bug can be tracked here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+bug/417757

Ubuntu 9.10 doesn’t come with VPN connectivity out of the box. So you need to install 3 packages to get it to work. Symptoms of these packages not being installed are grayed out “Add” buttons and grayed out “Apply” buttons in the VPN connection manager.

Here’s the command to install the 3 packages:

sudo apt-get install network-manager-pptp network-manager-vpnc network-manager-openvpn

I have no idea why Ubuntu doesn’t include these packages by default. Looks like a great many people are having this issue: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager-pptp/+bug/107738

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu Karmic Koala and fully expected this to break my VMWare server install. Sure enough I got plenty of errors when trying to compile VMWare Server with the latest kernel. Here’s the solution:

Download VMware Server (2.0.1 or 2.0.2) – in gz format. You will also need a license key.

If you have tried to install vmware server already and something went wrong during the install, then do these two steps first:

first, delete the vmware modules

rm -rf /usr/lib/vmware/modules/

if needed (you’ll know if you need to do this one):

rm -rf /lib/modules/2.6.31-13-server/misc/vm*

Install:

Run vmware-install.pl. Somewhere in the installation process you should be asked:
Do you want this program to invoke the command for you now? [yes]
you should answer: no

Then run the patch vmware-server.2.0.1_x64-modules-2.6.30.4-fix.sh.

sudo ./vmware-server.2.0.1_x64-modules-2.6.30.4-fix.sh

After this, run

/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

If the vmware-config.pl aborts, because it couldn’t shut down all vmware services then kill them manually and then rerun vmware-config.pl:

kill -9 $( grep -i vm | awk '{ print $2 }' )

And hopefully that should work!

I needed to copy across my favorites when I got a new phone recently. In order to do this you simply need to copy across 2 files to the “/copilot/EU/Save/” folder on your new phone:

/copilot/EU/Save/favorite.lst
/copilot/EU/Save/stopfavs.lst

I did this on CoPilot 7. The folder structure may be slightly different on later versions.

By Default Ubuntu will move data in RAM onto the swap file/partition on the hard disk long before it runs out of memory. It will pick data that isn’t accessed often but this can still be an annoying slow down on the system. To prevent the over use of SWAP space and speed things up all we need to do is change one setting… swappiness.

Swappiness can be set from 0 to 100. The default is 60 and the lower it is the more the computer will try to keep everything in RAM.

If you want to temporarily change the swappiness then run this command with desired swappiness level:

sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=10

Alternatively if you want the change to be permanent then edit this file:

sudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf

Set swappiness to the desired level (in this case 1) by either modifying this line in the file “/etc/sysctl.conf” or if it doesn’t exist, add it at the end.

vm.swappiness=1

Reboot the computer for the change to take effect.